We are aware of the importance of Search Engine Optimization or SEO to our websites and its significant impact on our digital marketing strategies. Most, if not all, of the businesses, are outsourcing reliable technology solutions companies to help in SEO and other digital marketing campaigns. You might think that everything these companies do is A-Okay and nothing to worry about. Have you ever wondered what the issues they face from time to time are?

Whether you are tech-savvy or not, give this article a good read and see for yourself if your business faces such or not:

You have a number of duplicated contents

According to Google, duplicate contents are “substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely matches other content or are appreciably similar.” It is more than plagiarism, but it is more on having or almost the same texts, images or contents, in general in different domains. You may have cited the legitimate sources, but you might still not get away from duplicates.

Semrush did a research and found out that 50% of the sites they have analyzed problematize duplicate content. If you think that the more articles or write-ups you do on the same topic or contents will give you better search ranking in Google or other search engines, it won’t. Unfortunately, the search engines will not be able to distinguish which page is to be prioritized. Thus, making your pages compete with each other.

Image issues such as missing alt tags and broken images

Visual contents like pictures and videos are a valuable part of web contents. It can be an asset and at the same time, a major SEO issue. The Same study was done by Semrush, 45% of pages have images with no alt tags and 10% with broken internal images.

Alt tags are crucial in image search. Even though search engines have other methods to do such task, alt tags should be able to clearly describe what the image is all about to help the search engine understand what it is. Moreover, for visually impaired people, alt tags are being used to describe the photo to them. As a web owner and manager, you should prioritize giving an outstanding user experience. Next time, don’t forget to write in alt tags and make sure to include your SEO keyword or phrases.

On the other side, broken images may have the same impact as of broken links. Search engines may have that as a reason for them to downgrade your website.

You don’t put in good-read Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are the short-text right below your blog title and website page in search results. It may not have a direct effect on page ranking, but it affects CTR or click-through rate. As defined by Google, CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown. Moreover, Meta descriptions give your users a view of what the page is all about. If in that short text they don’t see your page useful to them, they would obviously skip clicking your page.

Broken internal and external links

The aim of having a website and useful pages are to give your users a good web experience and navigation. If you have a lot of broken links, internal and external, it might be a danger to you. Aside from a traffic dropdown, you leave an impression to your web visitors that your website is low quality and outdated.

When search engine bots go to your site and encounter many broken links, your pages have the risk of not being crawled and indexed. You should fix this issue as soon as you can as it can reduce the number of pages that will be seen in the search engine results.

Your website takes forever to load

Aside from providing excellent user experience, page speed is vital for having good search rankings too. As advised by Oleg Korneitchouk, director of digital marketing and development for SmartSite, you need to make sure that the elements you have on your pages such as images, videos, CSS style sheets, JavaScript code and others are optimized for speed as possible.

Low word-count or thin contents

There is no minimum word count per content. However, Google is said to rank contents, which have more depth higher, and longer content is an indicator of depth. Nevertheless, you should not forget that you are not writing just to have better search results ranking but for your readers as well. Make good contents not just for the bots but more for your readers.

Your website has poor mobile experience and navigation

Visitors would not spend much time and effort to zoom in the texts and patiently navigate to your poorly designed website. You should remember that most people access online thru their smartphones and probably are busy to go through your site steadily. If they found your site to be not optimized for smartphones or tablets (or other gadgets in that sense), they will leave your page and look for other sites that can give them better user experience and navigation.

Shady link building

Same with other SEO strategies, link building can make or break you. As mentioned by Mike Waller owner of SEO Zones Inc., backlinks should be done at a natural pace, be diverse and varied and should appear natural. Thus, spam-like, irrelevant and “black-hat” backlinks will do no good for your website. You can ask webmasters questionable and unwanted backlinks to be removed on your site.

If your web page or your digital marketing strategies do not seem to give you the results that you worked for, it’s time for you to step up your game and resolve the issues that you have. Digital marketing activities such as SEO are a sound investment. Don’t put that to waste and always strive for the betterment of your brand. Always remember that at the end of the day, you want to deliver good user-experience be it online or offline.